Private Affairs

A columnist for the home front

A man is divorced and only then learns how to be a father. A woman goes to work and worries about failing as a mother. A man and a woman attain the same professional pinnacle; she rejoices in surpassed expectations, he mourns fallen dreams. Everywhere Boston Globe Columnist Ellen Goodman turns, grownups are suffering growing pains, and so is she: "It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through."

Goodman's knowing explorations of change and its debilitating side effects have made her the sudden sensation of America's editorial pages. First syndicated in 1976, her twice-weekly column now appears in 207 papers, 45 of which have signed on this year. A collection of her pieces, Close to Home (Simon & Schuster; $9.95), was published last month. The book's 109 selections show Goodman at her evenhanded best, a cool stream of sanity flowing through a minefield of public and private quandaries. "The thinking woman's Erma Bombeck," says an editor at the Los Angeles Times. Observes Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship: "She's talking over the back fence to everybody in a very sophisticated, grownup way."

Goodman can raise a lump in the throat, writing movingly about a workaholic who dies at 51, a faded flower child of the '60s, or women who outlive their husbands. She can elicit a hearty chuckle by recounting how she lavished "time, money, attention and great expectations on four of the only all-male zucchini plants to exist in the memory of my county Agricultural Extension Service." Her feminism is sharp but not strident. When the Supreme Court limited state-financed abortions, she imagined Justice Lewis Powell "barefoot and pregnant" and offered him "a slightly salted wafer to appease his morning sickness."

Goodman describes herself as "a 38-year-old woman, mother, vegetable gardener, failed jogger and expert on only one subject: the ambivalence of life." Her extended family shares "not only an area code but also a zip code" near her native Boston, and rarely does a week go by when she doesn't see some relation or other. Divorced and the mother of an eleven-year-old daughter, she is at her most eloquent when tackling subjects close to home. "The pleasure of being a parent," she wrote last year, "is the extraordinary experience of having short people who hang around a while, who change you as they change, who push and prod and aggravate and thrill you and make life fuller."

After graduating from Radcliffe in 1963, Goodman worked as a Newsweek researcher and later a Detroit Free Press reporter before joining the Globe as a feature writer in 1967. The Globe let her write a few opinion pieces and in 1972 made her a regular columnist, first in the Living section and then on the editorial page. Says Anne Wyman, the Globe's editorial-page editor: "At the beginning, I thought she was rather shrill. She's become much more thoughtful, much more serious, also much more compassionate." Goodman is not a columnist who strives for Delphic detachment. "You can't be an anonymous, amorphous 'voice of authority,' " she believes. "You have to establish a person who can be trusted, who is reasonable, who is honest." Her columns touch readers in a very personal way, like a reassuring squeeze of the hand, and at least 100 write her letters every week. Says Mary Jo Meade of Conway, Ark., editor of the Log Cabin Democrat's Weekender magazine: "She usually hits to the core of things, and folks just eat it alive. They say, 'All right!' "

Many columnists who draw on their own experiences find that the well quickly goes dry, but Goodman shows no sign of flagging. She recently completed a six-month stint as a guest commentator on NBC'S Today show, and now is said to be a leading contender to replace Shana Alexander as half of the "Point-Counterpoint" team on CBS's 60 Minutes. If she does, she insists, it won't be to joust with Conservative Columnist James Kilpatrick, as Alexander did. "Debate polarizes, and everything I've tried to do is the opposite--to find the connections, not the differences," says Goodman. "Besides, debate is black and white. I'm much more interested in gray."

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